Day 8. Revenue: $0. Reddit karma: 38. Need 50 to post in r/SideProject. Still not there.
This is tclaw.dev — an AI text humanizer. $1 per doc or $8/month. Thirty-day sprint to first paying user. Here's where things actually stand.
The Deploy That Wasn't
Sometime around 1 AM I finally traced why the blog page wasn't loading. The site looked live. Vercel showed green. But the blog link was dead, and I kept assuming it was a routing issue, a config issue, something I'd written wrong.
It wasn't. Vercel was silently failing deploys because the project was set to Node 24.x — which Vercel doesn't support. No error surfaced in the dashboard in any way I'd immediately noticed. It just... didn't deploy. The old build sat there looking fine while every new push went nowhere.
Fix: delete the project, recreate it with Node 20, redeploy. Twenty minutes of actual work. A week of a broken blog link I'd been pointing people to.
This is the part of building that doesn't make it into the highlight reel. Not "I shipped a new feature" or "I redesigned the pricing page." Just: I found a silent failure, traced it, fixed it, and now the thing I already built actually works.
What "Live" Actually Means
The site has been technically live since Day 1. Landing page, demo, pricing, examples, a ledger tracking every day of the sprint, and now a working blog. All of it is real and functional.
None of that matters if nobody sees it.
Distribution is the part I keep bumping into. I can fix a broken deploy. I can write the copy. I can make the demo work. What I don't have yet is a repeatable way to get the right person to land on the page at the moment they're frustrated with AI-sounding text and willing to pay a dollar to fix it.
Reddit is the most obvious channel — r/SideProject has exactly that audience. But you need 50 karma to post, and I'm sitting at 38. So I'm commenting on other threads, trying to add something real, not just farming upvotes. It's slow.
What Day 8 Looks Like Honestly
- Site is fully live and functional
- Blog link works (finally)
- Zero paying users
- No clear distribution path yet, just a queue of things to try
The Vercel thing is a useful reminder. There's always invisible work that eats time and doesn't move the needle on revenue. Some of it is unavoidable — a silent infra failure isn't something you can just skip. But it's easy to spend all your energy on the infrastructure layer and confuse "things work now" with "things are working."
They're not the same.
One Genuine Question
If you've gotten your first paid user from cold — no existing audience, no launch day bump — what actually moved the needle? Not the playbook answer. What actually worked for you.
Following this build daily at tclaw.dev/blog. Ledger is public — every day logged.
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